The words transcendence and transcend are thrown around a lot in spiritual communities, and among spiritual people. What does it mean to transcend, and what is transcendence? What is the crux of it? How should it be understood? The scientific community has now discovered that there is much more to existence than meets the eye.
The Sufis have always said that we cannot see reality with our eyes, we need to see with the eyes within the eyes. Scientists have now concluded that besides the material things that we see, there is a whole world underneath of all this, which they call quantum or quantum mechanics, which is the interaction of atoms and the interaction of sub-particles that create what we see. They have also discovered that in reality most of what we see, even though it looks as though it is solid is empty space, most things are made up of empty space. There is an entire quantum world, this sub-atomic world is different from the world that we see.
The world that we see is usually referred to as the Newtonian world, the world that is described by Newtonian physics. If we throw something at a certain speed, and it hits something, it will hit with a certain reaction, it will move in a certain way. Newtonian physics describes the physical nature of things. But once we go beneath the physical nature of things, there is a whole other quantum world that cannot be described in the same way that the physical world is described.
The Sufis say, Lā ilāha ill-Allāhu, nothing exists but Allah. They talk about the illusory nature of existence, and how this existence is an illusion. The underpinnings of what we see is where reality is, what we see is not reality. This illusion is a manifestation that comes from those underpinnings, and we treat this manifestation as if it was the sum total of reality without understanding that what is holding this up, and what is manifesting as this reality is where reality exists. This reality that we see is a shadow. Actual reality is somewhere beneath what we see.
It is just like when we go to the movies, the projection that you see on the screen is not how that projection happened, that projection could not occur without something shining onto that screen and creating that light shadow that we see as a movie.
